In the last few years telecommunications devices, such as cellular phones, landline phones and IP-based phones, have become more and more capable, offering an increasing array of functions. Once limited to simple point-to-point voice communications, telecommunications devices have evolved into so-called “smart phones” that offer many different modes of telecommunication, such as voice, video, text messaging, instant messaging, email, and other modes of communication. Furthermore, modern smart phones have capabilities approaching those of more traditional desktop computers, including the ability to load and run third party applications. Applications are available for business use, as well as for personal use, education, and entertainment.
Many people view their telecommunications devices as critical to daily life: necessary for coordinating both business and personal activities. Among many families, cell phones, in particular, are becoming a primary means of communication interaction between parents and children. This allows parents to keep in touch with their children; however, once a child has a cellular phone parents frequently have little control over the extent to which it is used or misused.
The advanced capabilities of modern communications devices create a variety of opportunities for access to information, as well as opportunities for interactions between users of these communication devices. Unfortunately, these opportunities are accompanied by costs, usually paid for by the parents, and the potential to distract children from other activities such as homework. Parents usually want to control access to functionalities on a cellular phone in order to protect their children from inappropriate content, minimize fees incurred by a child's activities, and minimum amount of distraction provided by devices that can be used to play games and surf the web.
Some telecommunications devices can indeed be configured to limit their communications capabilities. For example, a phone might be configured to accept telephone calls only from specified parties such as parents. Likewise, the phone might be configured to only allow certain outgoing calls. Access to content and activities can be similarly limited. However, these types of configuration choices are inflexible and mainly exclusionary. They do not allow the parent to control how and when a child uses the phone.